Quotes About Experience

Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..

There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.

I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;

People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.

There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus.

An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

the remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were

It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book.